Interestingly this looks a lot like the leaked images that circulated in the hours leading up to the "One more thing..." announcement, which turned out to be accurate. The serial number on the picture reads "MB719ZA", and according to MacShrine the Chinese characters on the tag read "this way up", which doesn't exactly help us out a lot...

If this is a fake, it's a very good fake indeed. I'm still wondering about the iCal related invite though, could we be looking at an iPod with at least some PDA functionality? Now that would be fun...

Update: Does that cable look like the MagSafe connector from the MacBook Pro to anyone else, or is it just me?

Update: There seems to be some discussion over on TUAW about the veracity of the Chinese characters,

The Chinese isn't written by a native. The characters aren't even consistent with one another as each character has the same radical, but whoever wrote this didn't know that and they wrote each radical differently, an idiosyncrasy NOT characteristic of any Chinese speaker. - Eno Compton

Strictly regarding the so-called Chinese characters, the two characters are copied incorrectly. I'm assuming they are supposed to be 这边, literally meaning "this side". I can't remember if the two characters are in long-form or short-form Chinese but aside from the incorrect use of root characters within the two characters, the stroke patterns, ie. number, direction, connection of strokes, are also incorrect. most definitely not "written" by native Chinese speaker nor anyone with a formal education in Zhongwen. - Timothy

However a video iPod would fit well with the other rumours (via The Register) of a iTunes movie store, so I guess your milage may vary.

Update: Despite these images, Apple Insider still seem to think that we're looking at an updated Mac mini. Interesting, do they have a source, or are they just guessing?

Update: Dan Abrams has had a close look at the picture, and has come to the conclusion that it's a fake. Unfortunately his analysis looks pretty sound, so on balance it's looking like this is yet another video iPod hoax.

Update: Following close behind a second image of the video iPod, a video showing how the fake image was made has shown up (via Digg). It looks like we have to conclude that this one, at least, is definitely a fake. I must admit to not being a little just a little bit disappointed...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.